Rewinding a supernova with machine learning

New work looks at using machine learning to decipher the early stages of supernovae explosions by reconstructing the light emitted during the outburst. The research was presented today at the 2022 National Astronomy Meeting by Eleonora Parrag, a Ph.D. student at the University of Cardiff. The most massive dying stars can produce some of nature's brightest fireworks: supernova explosions. These can be used to probe distances in space and answer questions about our universe, as well as producing much of the very material which makes up the world around us. The physics governing a supernova changes in the hundreds of days past its explosion; snapshots of this physics can be captured in terms of a supernova's spectrum--where the light is dispersed by wavelength in the way we see the colors in a rainbow.